When will importers get their money?

Company lawyers are celebrating the court orders that require tariff refunds. Trade analysts and customs attorneys have a more practical question, which is when importers will see the cash, and the answer they have arrived at is less cheerful.

Liquidated or not

Timing depends almost entirely on whether customs has formally 'liquidated' an import entry. When goods clear an American port, the entry stays unliquidated for roughly 314 days while customs officers check its valuation and classification. For the 20.1 million entries still officially unliquidated, automated systems can reverse the duty and pay an electronic refund within weeks.

Liquidation is the moment the government's assessment of duty becomes final. By law an entry is deemed liquidated a year after it is made unless Customs extends the period, and in practice the agency schedules most liquidations a little earlier, which is where the figure of roughly 314 days comes from. Before that date, an importer can correct its own entry electronically through a post-summary correction, and Customs can adjust the duty without any formal dispute. After it, the assessment stands unless it is challenged.

Protests pile up

Entries that have already been liquidated are another matter, and there are tens of millions of them. Importers must file an individual 1520(c) protest for each by hand. US Customs and Border Protection does not have the clerical staff to work through claims on that scale.

The deadlines make the burden heavier. An importer generally has 180 days after liquidation to protest, and Customs then has its own period to decide; if it denies the protest, the importer can take the matter to the Court of International Trade, another step measured in months. Each stage requires documents for each entry. For a firm that imported through dozens of ports over eighteen months, that can mean thousands of separate filings.

A clock that sorts importers

The liquidation rule divides importers by when they shipped. Goods entered in the months just before the Supreme Court's ruling are mostly still unliquidated and can be refunded quickly. Goods entered early in 2025, when the emergency tariffs began, have mostly passed the liquidation date. A company's refund timetable therefore depends less on how much it paid than on when it paid it, and firms that front-loaded imports early in 2025 to beat higher rates may find that the same decision now delays their money.

For anyone modelling the cash flows, this produces a lumpy distribution rather than a smooth one. A large block of refunds on unliquidated entries should arrive within weeks of Customs issuing instructions, followed by a long tail of payments on protested entries that could stretch over years. Discounting that tail at any reasonable rate reduces the present value of a claim well below its face amount, which is why buyers of refund claims pay less than par.

Recent litigation shows how long these processes can take. When importers challenged the tariffs imposed on Chinese goods in 2018 and 2019 under Section 301, thousands of companies filed separate suits at the Court of International Trade to preserve their right to refunds, and the cases took years to move through the courts before the tariffs were eventually upheld. The harbour maintenance tax refunds that followed a Supreme Court ruling in 1998 also took years to pay. In both cases, the volume of individual claims rather than the legal question set the pace.

Accounting adds a further wrinkle. Companies can record a refund as income only when it is probable and can be reasonably estimated, so a firm with unliquidated entries may book its gain within a quarter, while one relying on protests may have to wait until Customs accepts each claim. Two companies with identical tariff bills could therefore report their windfalls years apart, which will make earnings comparisons across the retail and consumer sectors harder to read.

Winners and losers from the timing

Large importers with recent entries and sophisticated customs teams are the winners: their claims are mostly unliquidated, and they have the staff and systems to file quickly. Customs brokers and trade lawyers will be busy for years. The losers are small and mid-sized importers whose entries are older, who lack in-house compliance staff and who may miss protest deadlines. The Treasury, which pays interest on overpaid duties, bears a growing cost the longer the process takes, although that cost is spread across many years of budgets.

One group of claimants may surprise American retailers. When a foreign seller ships goods on terms that make it responsible for duties, it often acts as the importer of record itself, and in that case the refund goes back to the foreign company rather than to the American buyer. Many online sellers and some manufacturers used such arrangements, so part of the refund pool will flow abroad, and American customers who paid a duty-inclusive price have no direct claim on it.

Ways to speed it up

The strongest counterargument is that the process need not be handled entry by entry. Customs has limited authority to reliquidate entries on its own initiative within 90 days of liquidation, and a court could order it to process refunds on liquidated entries in bulk rather than waiting for individual protests. Customs has also invested heavily in its electronic systems, which could in principle identify every entry that paid the voided duties and calculate the refund automatically. If the courts or the administration choose that path, the gap between the two groups of importers would narrow sharply.

That depends on political will as much as technology. The administration has little incentive to accelerate payments that add to federal borrowing, and bulk processing requires instructions that Customs has not yet issued. Unless a court insists, the default is the slower route.

The signals to watch are guidance messages from Customs to the trade, any order from the Court of International Trade directing bulk reliquidation, the volume of refunds shown in the daily Treasury statement, and disclosures by listed companies of when they expect to receive their cash. The $166 billion refund will reach importers at two speeds. Big firms with unliquidated entries should see wire transfers within weeks, while smaller firms holding liquidated paperwork probably face years of protests before they get their money back.